Matthew King

@cincinnatusc.bsky.social

476 Followers 389 Following

Work submitted here was also submitted to... Review of Scientific Instruments birdsandbeesandblooms.com

Radar grab showing lake effect showers off both Lake Huron and Georgian Bay, with very nicely defined streamers stretching almost all the way to Lake Ontario from Georgian Bay
Dog Day Cicada on False Sunflower
Screenshot of Weather Underground forecasts for Friday (showing a probability of precipitation of 67%) and Saturday (showing a probability of precipitation of 73%)
One of the dogs from The Littlest Hobo, with title text reading "Starring LONDON in"
Maple Keys and Ducklings The system is acceptable for plants: a million seedlings wither in the sun, or topple, dampened off, for every one that won’t succumb to stony circumstance. Those paratroops whose plot the wind’s undone we would’ve weeded out—who’d look askance at math that means they never had a chance? And still a few will root—we’d rather none. But count the turtle hatchlings on the shore, and count the ducklings trailing in a row, then add up adults back next spring—no more than came to nest here months or years ago. You needn’t wonder where the others went. But count again those lives so freely spent. — Matthew King, Marmora, Ontario, Canada
Wilderness Gothic (by Al Purdy) Across Roblin Lake, two shores away, they are sheathing the church spire with new metal. Someone hangs in the sky over there from a piece of rope, hammering and fitting God’s belly-scratcher, working his way up along the spire until there’s nothing left to nail on – Perhaps the workman’s faith reaches beyond: touches intangibles, wrestles with Jacob, replacing rotten timber with pine thews, pounds hard in the blue cave of the sky, contends heroically with difficult problems of gravity, sky navigation and mythopeia, his volunteer time and labor donated to God, minus sick benefits of course on a non-union job – Fields around are yellowing into harvest, nestling and fingerling are sky and water borne, death is yodeling quiet in green woodlots, and bodies of three young birds have disappeared in the sub-surface of the new county highway – That picture is incomplete, part left out that might alter the whole Dürer landscape: gothic ancestors peer from medieval sky, dour faces trapped in photograph albums escaping to clop down iron roads with matched grays: work-sodden wives groping inside their flesh for what keeps moving and changing and flashing beyond and past the long frozen Victorian day. A sign of fire and brimstone? A two-headed calf born in the barn last night? A sharp female agony? An age and a faith moving into transition, the dinner cold and new-baked bread a failure, deep woods shiver and water drops hang pendant, double yolked eggs and the house creaks a little – Something is about to happen. Leaves are still. Two shores away, a man hammering in the sky. Perhaps he will fall.
The Oven Bird By Robert Frost There is a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again. He says that leaves are old and that for flowers Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten. He says the early petal-fall is past When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers On sunny days a moment overcast; And comes that other fall we name the fall. He says the highway dust is over all. The bird would cease and be as other birds But that he knows in singing not to sing. The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing.
The Purest Light If the sun, for all eternity, Should set tonight, nevermore to rise; If darkness should forever fill the skies And all the cheery stars should cease to be, After this night, it would not matter to me: For I have seen the wondrous well where lies The purest light: such light as in your eyes I could not on this Earth again hope to see. If, at the dawn, the sun does rise anew With its full splendor in crystal skies of blue, It could not be to my charmed eyes as bright. The only light I crave I've seen in you: And so I hope we may postpone the morning dew, That you may ever be my only light.
A largely grey painting of a largely empty room, containing a large couch and some other items of furniture clustered oddly in the far corner, with a woman seated at a table (which appears possibly situated subtly in defiance of laws of physics and/or perspective but at least of feng shui) with her back toward the viewer, sunlight approaching her at a downward angle on the wall, coming from a large window apparently somewhere behind the viewer
The "I am Spartacus!" shot from Spartacus but the guys are saying "I peeled the pool!"
Simpsons gif: Vegas is an abomination but they blew a four goal lead in the third period. So I like it.
Screenshot of current Environment Canada forecast for Saturday, which now has "60 percent chance of showers"
Environment Canada forecast for Saturday, which is simply "Showers."
Screenshot of consecutive posts in my feed: a poem by Peter J. King called "Upward" and a painting by Jason Carter called "The Climbing Bear 3"
Screenshot of an ad behind home plate in Toronto manually altered to inform Pete Fairbanks that he stinks
What appears to be an approximately four-foot-tall tree with large red bloom, in a large white pot in which is also stuck a small metal and not pink flamingo
A collage kind of picture made of a partially completed puzzle of an apparently female person laid on top of a newspaper classified page and what seems to be maybe a watercolour landscape with a red building and I'm not sure what else
Screenshot of the song of the Nashville warbler as represented in a graph on the Merlin app
An expiring bouquet of various tulips against a bright yellow-green background of the world out the window behind it
Dark grey pigeon with a wide-open orange eye, its beak slightly open and its head feathers slightly ruffled
A hazily lit swamp with trees and fallen trees and small insects flying around, but the point is the hermit thrushes singing
Screenshot of a tweet from Philip Traylen aka thus spoke zara thirst trap reading "no poet has ever written a good essay, why would they, 'have you ever fried a cat' 'nope haven't fried a cat'"
The AI models studied here do not use any knowledge of physical principles and do not explicitly enforce energy balances or other physical constraints. They are purely data-driven and essentially interpolate between observed historical weather patterns in the training period 1979–2017 to produce forecasts for new initial conditions in the test period. This is in stark contrast to physics-based numerical models like HRES that strongly rely on partial differential equations describing the evolution of the atmosphere based on our understanding of physics.
Screenshot of Baseball Reference newsletter showing that a guy named Elmer made his major league debut for the Yankees
Bart spinning into Dr. S.'s Spirograph lair
Disputed edit Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. As quoted in Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (2004): "John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." This has since been cited as a direct quote by some, but the remark is very likely a paraphrase from Steinbeck's article "A Primer on the '30s." Esquire (June 1960), p. 85-93: "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I
Screenshot of an e-mail subject line reading "Joint our Webinar: Mastering Emotions in Investing"
“There is a gold light in certain old paintings” By Donald Justice 1 There is a gold light in certain old paintings That represents a diffusion of sunlight. It is like happiness, when we are happy. It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light, And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross Share in its charity equally with the cross. 2 Orpheus hesitated beside the black river. With so much to look forward to he looked back. We think he sang then, but the song is lost. At least he had seen once more the beloved back. I say the song went this way: O prolong Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong. 3 The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work. One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good. The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar. Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good. And all that we suffered through having existed Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.
A large black bird with blue eyes, an orange face, and a large bill, with what look like two large ears extending horizontally from its head
The decision to do my studies at UCalgary meant leaving another program. A big part of the reason was to follow my partner, and now spouse, Berly Brumble. We got married right here in the Department of Philosophy lounge space (by Dr. David Dick, no less) and that was a valuable outcome indeed!
The top of an amaryllis stalk with three open red flowers and one about to open
A newly fully opened red amaryllis flower
An amaryllis stalk with four red blooms about to open and some goldfinches outside the window behind it
David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King asking "how are you enjoying my Labyrinth?"
Google maps screenshot: a large bird of prey perched inside a large cage-like enclosure, with the comment: "It's like a huge zoo. I highly recommend it to my children. The charm is spectacular."
The Song Rehearsal Degas, National Gallery of Scotland It seems familiar somehow, though it's set In a parlor in New Orleans–another age. It's summer–the furniture is draped in white. A shadowed man looks up from the piano. Two women are rehearsing a duet– One is striding down an imagined stage In full-throated aria, the other, Turning her face away, holds up her right Hand against the blast of shrill soprano. But reading the little plaque, I understand– The casual scene from life begins to change To genre. The woman with the lifted hand, Turning away, as if half-terrified, With loose, high-waisted skirt, will be a mother. The singer bearing down on her, mouth wide, Is the angel trumpeting the news so strange, So ordinary, it's difficult to believe– And greater than anything she could conceive.
Could you have ever imagined the current upheaval being a possibility in the 1990s at a time in which many embraced a philosophy of history that suggested the arrival of history’s end? JH: Well, I never believed in that naïve idea. However, the current abrupt break with the history of Germany’s continuous rise under the protection of the United States came as a surprise. For me, however, this does not have the meaning of a break with a “philosophy of history” in the usual understanding of the term that sees history progressing toward a goal. After all, this is a different matter from my own endeavor to seek the tailwind of encouraging learning processes on which we can draw, in full awareness of historical contingencies—learning processes with which it would be wise to seek to connect today.
But I experienced the attack on Ukraine as a fateful violation of an inhibition concerning the archaic violence of war, an inhibition that had become uncontroversial in Europe. Yet the outbreak of this war with a nuclear power did not trigger any anguished reflection, but instead immediately prompted a highly emotionalized war mentality, as if the enemy were standing outside our own door. These bellicose reflexes – as though we had not learned in the meantime to see war in Europe as a superseded stage of civilization – really irked me.
Rockwell free speech guy
Prime Minister Mark Carney, very quickly out of the gate, endorsed this military action. Should he have? This is a complicated question. I don’t say this as a value judgment, just as an empirical matter, but with the radicalism of the change in foreign policy that Carney has brought, Carney is the least Pearsonian prime minister in Canadian history. The Carney view is, while Canada spent much of its existence as a nation under the protection of the superpower of the day — first Great Britain, then the United States — under that protection, Canadians never had to worry much about their own security.
IMDB topline numbers for Barry Lyndon: 78% on the Tomatometer, 92% on the Popcornmeter
IMDB topline numbers for Under the Skin: 83% on the Tomatometer, 55% on the Popcornmeter
A cat drinking water out of a large bowl by scooping it up with his hand and licking his hand
Screenshot of a bluesky post from the New Yorker promoting an article about Robin Wright having met Ayatollah Ali Khamenei once; there is a picture of mourners for Khamenei; in the middle there is a woman holding a portrait of him, and to the side there is a man wearing a grey toque with a New York Yankees logo on it
xkcd comic about how you should not make fun of people for not knowing things everyone knows but instead show them the coke and mentos trick
The wolf-like dog that joined the cross country skiing thing at the Olympics, as seen in the finish line photo
Dear Doktor, Your website ignores incoming email. You don't seem interested in what I think. Too right. If you think that anybody wants to read your daft poetry, hear your crap band or put up with a torrent of cheap emotional blackmail
The "example sentences" section of the Merriam-Webster.com page for the word "orison", giving the following example sentence: "Kibandi discussed with us about the power of art in creating change and how photography can be a vehicle for culture expanding orisons for girls and women." — Caterina De Biasio, Vogue, 16 Dec. 2025
Snow between two tree trunks, eroded in such a way as to look something like an angel, with the sun peeking through its neck area from behind it
Screenshot of the Wikipedia article for Septuagesima: In popular culture In 1894, Oscar Wilde told the actor Charles Brookfield, who had complained about Wilde's conducting rehearsals for his play An Ideal Husband on Christmas Day, "the only festival of the Church I keep is Septuagesima".
Radar map of eastern US and Canada, 9:10 pm, January 25, 2026
National Weather Service forecast map, cropped to the eastern US and southeastern Canada, for 7 pm EST, Jan. 25, 2026, showing a large complex storm system in multiple colours
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, translated by Alphonso Lingis, p. 180
Rainbow splotches, one of which is kind of Pacman-shaped, on a dark blue wall
A rectangle of snow divided in half with light blue shadowed snow over brightly lit white snow
Two vultures, one of which is telling the other "I just got my PhD and nobody seems to care"; the other doesn't seem to care
Screenshot of successive posts in my feed, the first being a picture of two vultures, one of which looks like it might be saying something the other one isn't interested in, and the second being a post quoting someone saying "I just got my PhD and nobody seems to care"
can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom
can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom now i can’t believe— that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”— all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as: life is merely to ovum and sperm and where those two meet and how often and how well and what dies there.
There Are Certain Poets I Like There are certain poets I like better than I like their poems. I find this curious even though there are plenty of people I like who write no poems at all. (I guess.) I feel like I should say "don't worry, I don't mean you," but then I wonder whether it's worse to like your poems more than you, I mean more than I like you, not more than you like your poems. I don't know if I should want you to like my poems more than I do or my poems more than me. I'm afraid I'd like it if you did, though as to the present one before you I have to hope you like me more.